The National Football League apologized to Canadian fans Monday for “inadequate service” after switching part of its live distribution to DAZN, an online streaming service, from traditional television packages.

DAZN, pronounced “da zone,” acquired the exclusive rights to NFL Sunday Ticket and NFL Red Zone after its parent company Access Industries Holdings LLC inked a multi-year deal with the NFL. DAZN wants to become the Netflix of sports.

But its first Sunday as the exclusive Canadian platform for the Sunday Ticket package — which allows fans to watch all games live — was more fumble than touchdown, highlighting the challenges of streaming live sports even as more Canadians cut the cord to consume video content online.

Many fans were left frustrated by dropped feeds, choppy video with mismatched sound and “live” streams that lagged behind the television broadcast. Regina resident Kevin Dosenberger, an avid NFL and CFL fan used to flipping channels quickly to watch multiple games on Sundays, was fed up when his nephew told him the score minutes before he saw a touchdown

“I would love the NFL executives who made that deal to have to watch their football through that thing,” Dosenberger said. “That would change their minds pretty fast.”

Rough start

For its part, the NFL acknowledged the rough start to the season with a statement from Michael Markovich, the NFL’s vice president of international media and business development.

“We are aware of the issues that our fans may have faced this past week/weekend and apologize for the inadequate service. We are absolutely committed to working with DAZN to provide our fans with the NFL experience that they deserve,” Markovich said.

The NFL is urgently assessing the information and data from the weekend and will also do so for Monday night’s games, he said.

“We will then define the right next steps to best serve our Canadian fans,” he said.

No one from DAZN was available on Monday to discuss what went wrong and how it will proceed going forward.

“We understand that for many fans the experience of DAZN this past weekend was not a great one,” the company said in a statement. “Our top priority is fixing those problems to give fans the experience they deserve.”

DAZN experienced similar problems in Japan when it launched its coverage of J. League soccer. (It paid US$1.9 billion for the 10-year rights to that content.)

Streaming problems

Kaan Yigit, president of consulting firm Solutions Research Group, said it’s no surprise for a new service to have early glitches. Still, live event streaming problems are larger compared to the minor annoyance of having to reboot a TV show on Netflix.

“In live sports if you’re buffering in the middle of a big play, it’s insane if you’re a sports fan,” Yigit said. “It kind of opens up a subtle opportunity for cable to promote the value of the quality and the error free nature when it comes to these big live events.”

That said, given younger audience preferences for streaming, he wouldn’t write off sports streaming in general.

“Streaming as a way to deliver video is the way of the future. I don’t think there’s any ambiguity about that,” he said.

But self-described diehard fan Rob Spanach, an Edmonton resident who installed a third TV so he could watch multiple games at once, wouldn’t mind reverting to older technology. DAZN wasn’t bad this weekend, he said, but the choppy video and poor customer service makes him miss his more expensive cable package.

“If I could pay an extra $100 to make it work perfectly, I’d do that in a heartbeat.”